Mark Twain and His Strangers
Strangers are interesting, right? Sure. You can see how Albert Camus titled his novel L’etranger or The Stranger. Something mysterious is always interesting. It’s been the nature of man to question the unclear the unknown. But there’s a writer who writes a lot about strangers in his works. You might not notice–well, I didn’t either. Well, let’s see what I can get from the library of Twain. You will find a stranger in the Carnaval of Crime, a stranger in The Jumping Frog, and another ‘comprehensive’ stranger in The Mysterious Stranger.
Thanks to Prof. Adams who suggested ‘Twain’s strangers’ as a paper topic, I will try now to figure out who are those strangers? If I cannot identify who the strangers are–what will likely happen–at least I can figure out how Twain came up with those strangers, those prevalent strangers.
So far, I can’t guess a thing. I just have some blind guesses concerning Twain’s strictness with details and facts and the unity of his work. It might be that those strangers come up because Twain does not want to feature a ‘named’ character if this very character does not have a very strong significance to be known by people. If he thinks that this certain character is worth reader’s recognition only for his/her action, not name, not characterization, not even origin, then the very character should not be named, his origin should not be told, and his characterization should be explained…
So far so…
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Your opinion is in my opinion logical. So far we are faced with a bulk of stories with so many names and characters. In some stories, a PASSERBY is also named. And Twain’s decision not to name a character who deserves recognition only for what he/she acts is, perhaps, a very wise decision. But a name is a name. It can make readers easily refer an action. It can also make us readers (I follow your style, brother
) focus our attention on the main characters. Just like Misdi and Sukab. Yeach, a reader like me need a name not only an action brutha.. so let me know in what case not naming a character is better than naming him/her.
September 23rd, 2008 at 5:20 am
Twain doesn’t refer to his strangers as “him/her”, brother. You will most probably find him say ‘the stranger’. See… they’re real strangers. They’re present in the books, but at the same time they’re absent because the author decides to call them stranger and gives no further information about this very stranger….
March 13th, 2009 at 7:24 pm
Wow! Thank you! I always wanted to write in my site something like that. Can I take part of your post to my blog?